Most advice on this subject asks you to become a different person. This does not. Everything below fits into a week you are already having, and none of it requires talent, a studio or a course.
1. Look at one thing properly
The cheapest change is not making art. It is spending two uninterrupted minutes in front of one picture instead of thirty seconds each in front of forty.
Try it with something you already own or already walk past. Two minutes is much longer than it sounds. You will start noticing the order things were painted in, where the artist got bored, what they left out. That habit transfers: after a few weeks you look at everything differently, including the light coming through your own kitchen window.
Museums are the obvious place, but a public library's art section is free and open, and you can sit down.
2. Draw small and badly, on purpose
Drawing is the fastest way to learn to see, and the reason most people stop is that they judge a ten-minute drawing by the standard of a finished picture.
The fix is to make it too small to be precious. A pocket notebook, one object a day, five minutes. A coffee cup, a shoe, a hand. Nobody sees these. The point is not the drawing, it is the ten minutes of looking hard at a shoe, which is a genuinely different mental state from anything else in the day.
3. Paint without the blank canvas
The blank canvas is where most people who want to paint actually stop. Not the paint, not the brushes, not the technique. The blankness.
Two ways round it. One is to paint from a photograph you took yourself, so the composition is decided and you are only solving color. The other is a numbered canvas, where the drawing and the color are both already resolved and what is left is the doing: fill in the sections, one color at a time, and a picture appears over a few weeks of evenings.
That second option gets dismissed as not-really-art, which misses what it is for. It is a way to spend twenty absorbed hours with a brush in your hand. Plenty of people move on to freehand painting afterward, and plenty do not, and both are fine outcomes. The designs are licensed original artwork rather than stock images, and there is a beginner's guide if you want to know how the sections work before you buy anything.
4. Take photographs with one restriction
Everyone has a camera and almost nobody uses it as anything but a record. One restriction turns it into a practice.
Pick something arbitrary and stick to it for a week. Only things that are red. Only shadows. Only what you can see from where you are sitting. The restriction forces you to look for pictures rather than photograph what happens to be in front of you, and that is the whole difference between taking photographs and making them.
It also produces the raw material for something else. A photograph you took, with clear light and one clear subject, is what a custom paint by numbers kit is made from.
5. Go to something local and small
Local art is easy to be snobbish about and worth going to anyway. An open studio weekend, a college end-of-year show, a library exhibition, a craft fair. They are free or nearly free, the work is uneven, and you get to talk to the people who made it, which almost never happens in a museum.
The uneven part is the useful part. Seeing work that is genuinely mixed in quality is far more encouraging than seeing only the very best, because it makes the whole thing look like something people do rather than something geniuses did.
On expectations
The most common thing that stops people is deciding in advance what the result should be, then measuring the afternoon against it. Set out to spend an hour making something rather than to produce a good thing in an hour, and the hour is a success either way.
Anything you finish, you can hang. Other customers' finished canvases are in the customer gallery, and how to frame a paint by number canvas covers getting it onto a wall.
